Parties are increasingly using digital transactions to conduct their affairs. Digital transactions include, but are not limited to: online shopping, transfers of funds, releases of digital assets, the creation and management of “crypto-currencies”, etc. Digital transactions require systems and methods for auditing those transactions and verifying their authenticity so that the parties of the transactions can trust that the transactions occur according to their expectations and that a clear and unambiguous record for those transactions exists. For example, users of a ride hailing application that dynamically prices its services may desire a reliable and tamper-evident log of the prices of services at time of request.
In one example, parties may rely on a trusted (or neutral) third party (or conglomeration of parties) to arbitrate their transactions or audit them after the fact, which requires an additional party to be part of the transaction, for the transacting parties to agree to the third party, and for the third party to periodically demonstrate its ongoing trustworthiness. In another example, parties may rely on a write-only database that maintains entries for transactions for later auditing (e.g., a blockchain), but depending on the database, extremely high read and write latencies are required to avoid fraudulent “double spends” of transactional resources. Unfortunately, due to the high amount of computational resources required to maintain and write to a verifiable write-only database, such as a blockchain, in a secure manner, individual transactions can take a long time to process, and are vulnerable to several attacks (e.g., man-in-the-middle, de-anonymization, selfish mining/forking records, pre-mining/double accounting).